Subsection 1 OCR
Optical character recognition or ORC used to be something that people were not aware of or thought would never go mainstream. Optical character recognition is cool technology that turns a picture of text or a PDF into plain text. Think of the power when you take a picture of a worksheet to convert it to text and then have a computer read it to you. For a student with a visual impairment or a reading disability, this technology is excellent. This awesome technology has not caught on the way we would like. The thought of scanning all of your document in your classroom for one student is something certain teachers are not enthusiastic about.
To our surprise, this technology still looks like it is going to go mainstream. It has not caught on as well as many of in the field would like. Google Drive now has optical character recognition or OCR technology. Other platforms are starting to follow. Software developers are allows looking to improve one past version of the products they sell. OCR is a technology that is being added to numerous products. At some point, this is going to be standard technology, and when you have a document, the expectation is that you will be able to quickly and easily convert it to any format and use with any tool.
Google OCR Honorable Mention
Google Has OCR technology to convert a picture to text. This is very important for electronic organization. You can take a picture store it on Google Drive then convert to text. OCR technology is not perfect. It can make mistakes but does works= very well. Google OCR converts handwriting to text in some cases. If you have hard to read handwriting, there will be a few mistakes. However, if you have print handwriting as most young people do, then it works. Remember this technology is developing and will only get better.
https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lApeCNK6Ic
https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-ocr-documents-for-free-in-google-drive--cms-20460
https://ccm.net/faq/34490-how-to-enable-ocr-in-google-drive
OneDrive OCR
OneDrive Converts PDFs to text.
OneNote Supports OCR
You can convert a picture to text with OneNote.
Prizmo Go - Instant Text OCR
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prizmo-go-instant-text-ocr/id1183367390
Prizmo - Scanning, OCR, and Speech
With this app, you can scan in PDFs and have them read to you. You take a picture of a document, and it reads it to you. You need good light for this to work. There is also a Macintosh version of this program. This is a great app, and it does work. However, it takes a little bit of patience to get it to work correctly.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prizmo-document-scanning-ocr/id366791896?mt=8
OCR is also known as Optical character recognition is an application or hardware that turns pictures into plain text. Pictures could mean an actual picture you take of a document or a PDF converted to text.
OCR Instantly Pro
You can convert a picture to text. This app can translate text into a different language.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thesimplest.ocrpro&hl=en
Free
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thesimplest.ocr&hl=en
Text Fairy (OCR Text Scanner)
This is a good OCR app.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.renard.ocr&hl=en
These programs will scan in the documents, but in some cases, you might need another program to read it. If you want to edit them in a word processing program, then you should be okay. Please read the information on the link under the product.
ABBYY FineReader
This is OCP software for the PC.
http://www.abbyy.com/finereader/
OCR Software – Readiris
This is software that does OCR scans.
http://www.irislink.com/c2-983-189/I-R-I-S----OCR-Technology-and-Document-Management-Solutions.asp